Prologue:
The year 1970 ushered in a decade of environmental legislation, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Despite or perhaps because of these landmark achievements, environmentalists as a group were marginalized by mainstream and corporate America….
…Until the late 1980s, when business leaders realized that going green was good for the bottom line and that it was time to cash in. Casting about for a more palatable term than “environmentalism,” CEOs zeroed in on “sustainability,” a moniker that sounded lofty in theory– “development that preserved the world for future generations”–but in practice meant you didn’t need to enact any more environmental regulations because the market would push everyone in the right direction.
Inspired by the likes of Paul Hawken, William McDonough and Ray Anderson, companies churned out corporate sustainability reports by the hundreds, and journalists like myself wrote glowing profiles of businesses that reduced their waste stream by x and their energy and water use by y, in the process making their employees happier and healthier and their products safer for consumption by young children…
…Until the 21st century, when it became apparent that despite all the sustainable businesses led by sustainable MBA graduates working in LEED certified buildings, greenhouse gas emissions, habitat destruction and species decline were still increasing at an alarming rate.
People also began to realize that sustainability as a concept meant almost anything anybody wanted and therefore nothing.
So opinion makers were once again cast adrift for want of a paradigm– until 2007, when the United Nations reported that for the first time in history, more people would live in cities than in rural areas. Mulling this over, the powers-that-be realized that they too, lived in cities and that urbanism was as good a metaphor as any for the kind of efficient green networks necessary to preserve the world for future generations.
As books, magazines and blogs about urbanism proliferated—Green Metropolis, Next American City, Urbanophile– city boosters reveled in the idea of the urban center as the ultimate ecological system, a place where people, money and ideas intersect for the greater good. Of course, cities are as much a magnet for epidemics, wars and terrorist attacks as they are fertile ground for urban agriculture, bike commuting and democratic protests in Egypt.
But never mind all that.
Epilogue
Because when we hop on our bikes for a coffee at Ristretto, we think how nice it is to live in a city at a time when cities are all the rage. And if we dream every once in a while of game changing federal environmental legislation—maybe a national renewable energy policy or a cap and trade–well, maybe it’s not a dream, it’s part of the history of (21st century) urbanism.
And if we’re lucky, we’ll get a chance to repeat it.
What is concerns me about urbanism is the lack of answers for persistent urban issues of segregation, poverty, and how urbanism has been co-opted by city boosters to attract new residents. No consideration of how 21st century urbanism affects residents that have lived in these cities since the 60′s and 70′s when everyone sounded the death nell for cities. Urbanism is a lifestyle or mindset that acts as if the city never existed before 21st century urbanists arrived. Detroit is a good example, all one hears about that city is how land has been appropriated for urban agriculture. Well, did we forget that Detroit is hypersegregated and many residents live day to day. How will an urban farm solve this. How will bike commuting change this? Urbanism is where people, money, and ideas intersect in the ultimate ecological ecosystem under a biodome of neighborhoods that do not consider how the periphery of the city lives.
Bill,
I agree that today’s “urbanists” tend to act as if cities are a new thing. They (we?) also tend to downplay the negative aspects of the city form. I was sort of making fun of both those attitudes in the piece. On the other hand, I think many people realize that successful urbanism means improving the lot of poor minority residents, but as you say, nobody has come up with the answers.
Read this article called ” The Problem With Boosterism” from Rustwire.com which gets at what I was saying. Urban issues are a nagging problem, the consciousness of the fact that they exist is our first step. Thanks for responding.,
It’s certainly true that there are urbanists who think the idea was born yesterday, and sprang full blown from the head of a 2005 condo. But way back in the early 1960′s there was Jane Jacobs, warning against the excesses of urban renewal, and celebrating the street life of her neighborhood. Some of us of a certain age had parents who deliberately moved next to rail stations. The idea of a vital city life has been around for a long time–it’s just gained currency, even fashionability recently. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it just means that it needs more depth.
Similarly, the fact that cities continue to have problems of segregation and inequality. That’s not too surprising given the disappearance of millions of middle income jobs, in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Segregation and inequality don’t get solved in the suburbs, people just have to cope with them in auto dependent places, where transportation costs are high. The housing bubble and collapse of the last decade has been particularly bad for lower middle income homebuyers in relatively cheap suburbs, who’ve seen house values and thus their equity collapse. There are segregation and inequality problems in cities, and they need to be solved in cities.